Volkswagen: Electric Cars Allow For Increased Interior Space

It’s a well-know fact that electric cars with the Tesla-like skateboard platform allow for increased interior and cargo room.

Volkswagen has now acknowledged this benefit of purpose-built electric cars by telling Autocar that the pure electric powertrain will result in cars with more spacious interiors.

That’s according to Volkswagen’s head of technology, Franck Welsch, who spoke of the automaker’s Budd-e pure electric concept car, which sits on the automaker’s MLB platform

Quoting Welsch:

“MLB delivers lots of advantages, and obviously there are several around the size of the powertrain and the greatly reduced need for cooling, Clearly that opens potential for better proportions around the footprint – you can push the cabin further to the edges to give more room to occupants.”

“But we are clear that we need attractive design, while making use of all the advantages the MLB offers. If you were to describe it as a Passat on the inside with the footprint of a Golf, that might lead you to the sort of advantage we hope to gain.”

“Yes, electrification offers an all-new way of looking at cars,but we don’t want to lose customers – we have to balance these factors while pushing to show what we can do. Customers like good design, interior space, comfort, a car that is fun to drive and more – we cannot compromise in any single area.”

Electric cars don’t require compromise, as Tesla has proven. What Volkswagen needs to deliver on is high range at an affordable price (the latter of which is not all that important for Tesla).

Thank you Volkswagen for acknowledging the fact that Electric vehicles are more spacious.

Yes in Tesla the 2 motors are connected to 2 axles and the bonnet if free to be used for baggage. So Tesla Model-S total interior space including passenger, trunk & frunk space is more than the biggest sedan.

People are not aware of it, if they know then more customers will go for it.

I was one of the consumers requested to comment on the original Hy-wire concept. Drive-by-Wire was a “scary” concept for us in that era. Many of us were new Prius owners who demanded the larger LCD display with more informative data presented. Electrically assisted steering was common to us, but we only learned in later years that this was the basis for auto parking and later autonomous driving. GM engineers were resistant to the LCD instrument cluster. From that point on, we affectionately referred to the project as the Hay-Wire Concept.